An Equal Music

Author: Vikram Seth
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 037570924X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Book Description
The author of the international bestseller A Suitable Boy returns with a powerful and deeply romantic tale of two gifted musicians. Michael Holme is a violinist, a member of the successful Maggiore Quartet. He has long been haunted, though, by memories of the pianist he loved and left ten years earlier, Julia McNicholl. Now Julia, married and the mother of a small child, unexpectedly reenters his life and the romance flares up once more. Against the magical backdrop of Venice and Vienna, the two lovers confront the truth about themselves and their love, about the music that both unites and divides them, and about a devastating secret that Julia must finally reveal. With poetic, evocative writing and a brilliant portrait of the international music scene, An Equal Music confirms Vikram Seth as one of the world's finest and most enticing writers.

A Suitable Boy

Author: Vikram Seth
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780140230338
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 1372

Book Description

Two Lives

Author: Vikram Seth
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780143104087
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 540

Book Description
Vikram Seth'S Captivating Book Is The Story Of A Century And Of A Love Affair Across A Racial Divide Shanti Behari Seth Was Born On The Eighth Day Of The Eighth Month In The Eighth Year Of The Twentieth Century; He Died Two Years Before Its Close. He Was Brought Up In India In The Late Years Of The Raj, And Was Sent By His Family In The 1930S To Berlin Though He Could Not Speak A Word Of German To Study Medicine And Dentistry. It Was Here, Before He Migrated To Britain, That Shanti'S Path First Crossed That Of His Future Wife. Henny Gerda Caro Was Also Born In 1908, In Berlin, To A Jewish Family, Cultured, Patriotic And Intensely German. When The Family Decided To Have Shanti As A Lodger, Henny S First Reaction Was, 'Don'T Take The Black Man!' But A Friendship Flowered, And When Henny Fled Hitler'S Germany For England, Just One Month Before The War Broke Out, She Was Met At Victoria Station By The Only Person She Knew In The Country: Shanti. Vikram Seth, Their Great-Nephew From India, Arrived In This Childless Couple'S Life As A Teenage Student. Now He Has Woven Together The Astonishing Story Of Shanti And Henny, And The Result Is An Extraordinary Tapestry Of India, The Third Reich And The Second World War, Auschwitz And The Holocaust, Israel And Palestine, Postwar Germany And 1970S Britain. Two Lives Is Both A History Of A Violent Country Seen Through The Eyes Of Two Survivors As Well As An Intimate Portrait Of Their Friendship, Marriage And Abiding Yet Complex Love. Part Biography, Part Memoir, Part Meditation On Our Times, This Is The True Tale Of Two Remarkable Lives A Masterful Telling From One Of Our Greatest Living Writers. Click Here To See Vikram Seth'S Microsite

How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)

Author: Ross W. Duffin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393075648
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
"A fascinating and genuinely accessible guide....Educating, enjoyable, and delightfully unscary."—Classical Music What if Bach and Mozart heard richer, more dramatic chords than we hear in music today? What sonorities and moods have we lost in playing music in "equal temperament"—the equal division of the octave into twelve notes that has become our standard tuning method? Thanks to How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, "we may soon be able to hear for ourselves what Beethoven really meant when he called B minor 'black'" (Wall Street Journal).In this "comprehensive plea for more variety in tuning methods" (Kirkus Reviews), Ross W. Duffin presents "a serious and well-argued case" (Goldberg Magazine) that "should make any contemporary musician think differently about tuning" (Saturday Guardian). Some images in the ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.

Temperament

Author: Stuart Isacoff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375703306
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Few music lovers realize that the arrangement of notes on today’s pianos was once regarded as a crime against God and nature, or that such legendary thinkers as Pythagoras, Plato, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and Rousseau played a role in the controversy. Indeed, from the time of the Ancient Greeks through the eras of Renaissance scientists and Enlightenment philosophers, the relationship between the notes of the musical scale was seen as a key to the very nature of the universe. In this engaging and accessible account, Stuart Isacoff leads us through the battles over that scale, placing them in the context of quarrels in the worlds of art, philosophy, religion, politics and science. The contentious adoption of the modern tuning system known as equal temperament called into question beliefs that had lasted nearly two millenia–and also made possible the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, and all who followed. Filled with original insights, fascinating anecdotes, and portraits of some of the greatest geniuses of all time, Temperament is that rare book that will delight the novice and expert alike.

Violin

Author: Anne Rice
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345425308
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
In the grand manner of Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice's new novel moves across time and the continents, from nineteenth-century Vienna to a St. Charles Greek Revival mansion in present-day New Orleans to dazzling capitals of the modern-day world, telling a story of two charismatic figures bound to each other by a passionate commitment to music as a means of rapture, seduction, and liberation.

The Inner Game of Music

Author: Barry Green
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0385231261
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Suggests techniques for overcoming self-consciousness and improving musical performances, shares a variety of exercises, and includes advice on improving one's listening skills.

All You who Sleep Tonight

Author: Vikram Seth
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780143418139
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Book Description

The Rosendorf Quartet

Author: Nathan Shaham
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802133168
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Book Description
Four German Jews , all refugees from Nazi Germany, and all first-rate musicians, arrive in Palestine in the 1930s. There they join a symphony orchestra, which although made up of Europeans serves as a propaganda vehicle for the Zionist state-in-the-making. Unable to express themselves within this melting-pot orchestra, they join together to form The Rosendorf Quartet. In this compelling and provocative novel, awarded Israel's prestigious Bialik Prize for Literature, Nathan Shaham examines the plight of these refugees, who must adjust to the old-new land--a place fraught with political struggle and impending violence. Kurt Rosendorf, the quartet's founder and first violin, would like to believe that his true homeland is music. Forced to leave his Christian wife and daughter in Berlin, he cannot adjust to life in Palestine and tries to live "outside history and geography." Konrad Friedman, second violin, is a young Zionist who constantly battles the urge to renounce the European, cultured life of the musician and dedicate himself to the Jewish cause. Bernard Litovsky, the cellist, is tired of wandering and longs for firm ground and a sense of home. The fourth in the quartet is the stunning Eva Staubenfeld, whose beauty and sexual liberation baffle and mesmerize her colleagues. Relieved to be far from the abuses of her past, she is furious that the accident of being born Jewish has disrupted her life. Uniting the four is Egon Loewenthal, a brilliant and underrated German author who has survived Dachau but cannot forsake the language of his persecutors. He decides that his next novel, written in German, will be about the quartet. The Rosendorf Quartet is not only a deft portrait of the complexities and contradictions that have gone to make up the state of Israel; it is also a stunning tribute to the curative powers of music, in whose realm dissonance, politics, and personal anguish dissolve into art, transcending human conflict and national boundaries

Equal Means Equal

Author: Jessica Neuwirth
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1620970481
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 139

Book Description
When the Equal Rights Amendment was first passed by Congress in 1972, Richard Nixon was president and All in the Family's Archie Bunker was telling his feisty wife Edith to stifle it. Over the course of the next ten years, an initial wave of enthusiasm led to ratification of the ERA by thirty-five states, just three short of the thirty-eight states needed by the 1982 deadline. Many of the arguments against the ERA that historically stood in the way of ratification have gone the way of bouffant hairdos and Bobby Riggs, and a new Coalition for the ERA was recently set up to bring the experience and wisdom of old-guard activists together with the energy and social media skills of a new-guard generation of women. In a series of short, accessible chapters looking at several key areas of sex discrimination recognized by the Supreme Court, Equal Means Equal tells the story of the legal cases that inform the need for an ERA, along with contemporary cases in which women's rights are compromised without the protection of an ERA. Covering topics ranging from pay equity and pregnancy discrimination to violence against women, Equal Means Equal makes abundantly clear that an ERA will improve the lives of real women living in America.